Scientists battle to save world’s coral reefs

The coral bleaching event sweeping the globe and destroying vast tracts of valuable coral reef is now officially the most widespread in recorded history, and is likely to continue for an unprecedented third year, according to the U.S. weather agency.

“It’s time to shift this conversation to what can be done to conserve these awesome organisms in the face of this unprecedented global bleaching event”, said Jennifer Koss, NOAA’s Coral Reef Conservation Program director.

While the bleaching event is global, it will hit the U.S. hard, especially in Hawaii, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Florida Keys, U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.

A bleaching event is not always a death sentence for corals.

The algae live inside coral cells and engage in photosynthesis, giving the corals energy and food, noted the Post.

Bleaching occurs when overly warm ocean waters cause coral to expel the algae living inside of it, which turns the coral white and erodes its structures, as Common Dreams has reported.

This doesn’t immediately kill corals – it depends on the length and severity of the thermal stress.

At the symposium, researchers said the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, the largest reef colony on the planet, saw some 1,400 miles of coral reef suffering from bleaching, some 93 percent of the entire colony.

Mark Eakin, director of NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch, told the Guardian, “The biggest bleaching threat over the next six months is to the reefs in two USA freely associated states: Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia”.

“What we have to do is to really translate the urgency”, said Ruth Gates, president of the International Society for Reef Studies and director of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology.

Gates, who helped organise a conference this week said the scientific community needs to make it clear how “intimately reef health is intertwined with human health”. The assessment was made after months of aerial and underwater surveys after the worst bleaching in recorded history first became evident in March as sea temperatures warm.

“The Great Barrier Reef is a major tourist attraction”.

And the world’s top marine scientists are still struggling in the face of global warming and decades of devastating reef destruction to find the political and financial wherewithal to tackle the loss of these globally important ecosystems.

While forecasters predict a change from a warm El Nino to cooling La Nina conditions this year, the impacts of the warmer waters over the past two years is taking its toll.

This newest update sheds light on the dire situation – NOAA says there’s now a 90-percent change we’ll see widespread bleaching among coral reefs near the Federated States of Micronesia and Palau, both of which are Pacific islands.

“We’re looking at a larger area being affected by this long term bleaching event than has ever been affected in a global bleaching event before”, Eakin says.